When they make the inevitable This Is Your Life-style programme on David Beckham, the former Manchester United manager Tommy Docherty will doubtless be wheeled out to reveal an astonishing and little-known fact.

While Docherty was starring in his own version of It Ain't Half Hot Mum as a National Service squaddie in Palestine 50-odd years ago, he played alongside a promising young midfield player called Gary West, who was to became the grandfather of one David Beckham.

The Doc, 71, thought of his old pal last week when Beckham got himself sent off in the World Club Championship game against Necaxa in Brazil. "Needless to say," says Docherty, "young David is a lot better than his grandad, who never made it as a pro. And I felt sorry for him after that red card. He did really well to handle all the terrible chants last season and now he is going to get slaughtered all over again."

Not that Docherty believes that Beckham and his team-mates should have been on the same continent, let alone within kicking distance of Necaxa, in a tournament that he believes is one of football's great follies. Today's game against the part-timers of South Melbourne, whom he also managed between 1981-82 and whom he describes as on a par with Stalybridge Celtic, is even more of a non-event.

Docherty says: "I was really looking forward to the tournament but I now believe it is one we could have done without. No team have really established themselves and I couldn't believe it when I heard that Manchester United had agreed to take part.

"It was a disgrace to pull out of the FA Cup to take part in something that seems to be all about greed.

"Brazil is probably the only country in the world where United haven't got a superstore and the only thing they've got out of it is a couple of million quid, which they hardly need, though I suppose Sir Alex Ferguson can now get a job with Fifa when he quits as a manager."

Docherty was first approached by South Melbourne when he was in charge of their National League rivals Sidney Olympic. But he returned to Britain for one of his short-lived jobs at Preston, where he lasted only eight months, before taking up the offer.

With training on only three days a week, he had plenty of time to pursue a policy of another day another Australian dollar, supplementing his wages with enough television and radio work to earn more than he would have done at a top English club.

For once in his life he also had to swap four-letter dressing-room language for diplomacy with his mainly Greek players, who, he says, "would go mad if you lost your rag with them".

"The fans were an excitable lot too. They were the best winners in the world and the worst losers.

"If we were losing they would throw apples and oranges at me, and of course, being me, I would make a big show of eating the apples and peeling the oranges. Naturally that made them even angrier and some of them would come round my house to let me know what they thought of me."

Having heard Ferguson claim that his team were desperate to win the World Club Championship and to do their bit for England's 2006 World Cup bid, Docherty was amazed at United's arrogance on the pitch and their petulance off it.

"They have left it until a bit late in the day for their public relations exercise," he says. "Before I took Scotland to Rio in 1972, I went out six weeks earlier and handed out thousands of flags, pins and other mementos to hospitals, hotel porters, whoever.

"It wouldn't have hurt United to have done the same. But seeing that they only went out there in the cause of greed, I suppose it would have gone against the grain for them to have given anything away. All they gave away in the end were those goals against Vasco da Gama."